Pointing the finger: The many shades of blame in the crash of Flight 752

Is it fair to blame Donald Trump for tipping a domino that knocked a passenger jet filled with Canadians out of the sky?

Michael McCain, chief executive of Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods, grabbed the limelight but he was not alone in blaming U.S. President Donald Trump for pushing a domino that went on to knock a passenger jet filled with Canadians out of the sky.

U.S. Congresswoman Jackie Speier said the disaster was “collateral damage” of Trump’s provocative sabre rattling. Iran’s president, while making arrests, spread the blame, saying the U.S. “caused such an incident to take place.”

Twitter users, of course, furiously apportioned blame: to Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani for threatening Americans, to Trump for killing him, to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for retaliating. Others condemned the idiot who fired the missiles that shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Tehran and the airline for continuing to operate.

“There is a difference between causal responsibility and moral responsibility,” said Scott Matthews, a professor who studies public opinion and political psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

“These things are connected causally. But is there a sense in which the president is morally responsible? We tend to think that moral responsibility is about foreseeable consequences of your actions. It is at that level that we decide someone’s behaviour is blameworthy or creditworthy.”

At this level, it becomes less clear.

With distance, catastrophic events can be traced through layers of cause and effect to find an ever widening or increasingly obscure antecedent to finger as the reason behind something.

There can be an infinite regression, such as is often done for the causes of the First World War.

Was it Gavrilo Princip, the teenaged assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? Or was it German militarism? Or was it the archduke’s vanity for sewing his coat’s lapel to its lining for a svelte appearance that delayed medical treatment after he was shot?

Debris from Ukraine International Airlines, flight PS752 that crashed after take-off from Iran’s Imam Khomeini airport, on the outskirts of Tehran, Iran Jan. 8, 2020 is seen in this screen grab obtained from a social media video.Reuters

It is a trope of time-travel science fiction that changing one small thing in the past goes on to inadvertently produce fundamental reorganization in the future.

Thinking of cause and effect on a narrower scale conjures a scenario of us inviting a guest to dinner who is then struck and killed by a drunk driver on his way over.

Are we to blame for his death? Emotionally we might lament that if we hadn’t extended the invitation, our friend would still be alive, but logically we must realize we could not have foreseen such an outcome. Our invitation may have helped bring his death, but the drunk driver bears the moral responsibility.

It could be seen as a thought puzzle, except the loss in this incident is so grave and the grief so fresh it is difficult to suggest it is anything approximating a game.

So McCain is not alone when, in his anguish over an employee’s loss of family on Flight 752, he publicly assessed the blame as “the collateral damage of this irresponsible, dangerous, ill-conceived behaviour” of Trump, who ordered the strike that killed Soleimani and set the region further off kilter.

There is a difference between causal responsibility and moral responsibility

If Trump’s actions are a cause then so is the retaliation by Iran. And then also, each in turn, the threat of a harsh response from the United States if Iran sought revenge and the heightened defensive stance by the Iranian military.

It is the sort of thing that can make the world a fragile place.

“Certainly there is a causal responsibility on both sides but who is morally responsible here? It is far less clear,” said Matthews. “A lot of different forces had to conspire to bring down that aircraft.”

All of us want to have a satisfying explanation

People, Matthews said, often lash out in anger and frustration when they face calamity. They look to place blame as a way of coping.

“All of us want to have a satisfying explanation when bad things happen. And people want to vent a bit as well when they are upset.”

Our fingers often point first and fastest to where we are predisposed to distrust or dislike.

For some, that would be Trump, for others the Iranian regime. Others’ anger will likely settle on other players in this tragedy.

Bruce MacKinnon, cartoonist for the Chronicle Herald newspaper in Nova Scotia, published an image on the weekend that captured the essence of this blame game.

It shows Trump and Khamenei pointing smoking guns at each other. Between them lies the body of a dead Canadian with two bullet wounds.

“The short form of the message of this image is, these two men share the blame for this,” MacKinnon told CBC.

It perhaps says something about the process of apportioning blame that while some in the West blame Trump for setting the stage for the Iranian missile to be fired at the airliner, some protesters in Iran are condemning their own leaders’ irresponsibility for the atrocity.

In this, perhaps Trump and Khamenei will find they share something in common.

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